Finally, religion has often provided motivation and mobilization for conservative political movements, such as prohibition, anticommunism, and, as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 11, the contemporary Religious Right.

Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939-41," which "need not detain us here."

But the real problem with Mr. Deaver's Bond is that he's so devoid of personality, unmotivated by a consuming ideological passion like Fleming's anticommunism, so frequently contrasted with John le Carré's supposedly more sophisticated Cold War moral equivalence and unburdened by emotional complexity.